Japanese-born percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and Asheville, North Carolina guitarist Shane Parish are both masters of musical nonconformity and have found a lot of simpatico as fellow collaborative free improvisors. Parish perfectly sums up the music they make together when he says, “There is so much trust between us and you can hear it in the spontaneous formal development of the pieces and in our kinetic action-reaction. We just turn off our thinking brain and we go on a journey.”
And that perfectly describes Interactivity, which is the second recorded encounter between to two put to an album. Last Night Now was the first, back from 2013.
About a year prior to this article, we examined Parish’s impromptu alliance with Wendy Eisenberg and we already know he plays well with others. He’s long been part of the progressive, experimental rock duo the Ahleuchatistas, but his solo career has largely been applying free-form principles to an acoustic guitar that’s influenced by country folk blues forebears such as Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotton, and that’s the side of Parish heard on Interactivity.
Nakatani is one of the most unique percussionists you’ll hear, not the least because his rig is unique: he has a bowed gong that he uses with hand-carved Kobo bow and singing bowls to go along with more conventional drums and cymbals. He is as amazing to watch as he is to listen to.
Parish’s fingerpicked guitar wanders with contentment and quietude for “Threadbare” during which Nakatani is pulling out all of the stops, and the exotic pieces he uses with abandon sometimes collide with that meditative acoustic guitar. It’s a very unusual alchemy but it connects because Nakatani has a sixth sense of where Parish is and where he’s headed.
Parish gets a little more randy on “Sight Lines,” and that puts him more in line with Nakatani’s frame of mind, who rumbles, bumps and crashes his way through the performance, kicking it up a notch at the moment Parish does. You’d swear that when he bows his gongs near the end is an ambient electronic backdrop but no, everything on this record is acoustic.
Likewise, Nakatani elicits a strange sawing sonority from his Kobo bow to launch “Embarkation,” but this time it resembles a fiddle. Parish is the one taking cues this time, syncing up with the percussionist. As Parish gets up to galloping speed, Nakatani moves on to the rest of his percussive weapons. From there, they move on to several more concepts conceived on the spot before they finally wrap up this twenty-one minute jaunt.
There’s so much ingenuity and telepathy going on with Interactivity, it’s easy to forget it’s all being done by merely an acoustic guitar and some percussion.
Interactivity is now out and available from Cuneiform Records. Purchase a copy from Bandcamp.
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